Right! We got to use our Head not our feelings to actually get into space regularly. It's not safe at all riding rockets you know that. Getting to 100kft is good enough to take advantage of other propulsion types. And slower accents to orbit.

Right! We got to use our Head not our feelings to actually get into space regularly. It's not safe at all riding rockets you know that. Getting to 100kft is good enough to take advantage of other propulsion types. And slower accents to orbit.

Monroe

But feelings is what Space Tourism is all about, and that is, currently, where there is available funding. Some people may want the slow boat, others the roller coaster. I'm guessing most will want the roller coaster (from a statistical sample of one)

If you are talking about getting in to space regularly for other purposes, then fine, but at the moment, the only way of doing this is with rockets.

I still don't see the point of a slow ascent. It just means that you're wasting more energy holding yourself up while you haven't reached orbital velocity yet. The sooner you get there, the sooner you can stop spending fuel.

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus

I still don't see the point of a slow ascent. It just means that you're wasting more energy holding yourself up while you haven't reached orbital velocity yet. The sooner you get there, the sooner you can stop spending fuel.

Most of the slow launch ideas are relying on lighter than air balloons of one kind or another and and if you put Archimedes displacement together with Newton and one of the gas laws you find that for every cubic metre of Hydrogen/Helium you get a force of about 11-12 Newtons in the upwards direction for free ie you dont have to expend any fuel until you hit equilibrium which can be several KM up at which point the atmosphere is a lot less dense and your starting point has a lot less frictional forces to deal with. Also if these technologies every progress to man capable flight i believe they can be designed to be inherently safer than current systems as in the event of a lot of forms of catastrophic failure you would be able to parachute to safety as you would have time to do so and it would not be like hitting a brick wall ejecting into thick atmosphere at high speed lower down.

_________________Someone has to tilt at windmills.So that we know what to do when the real giants come!!!!

I think I did some numbers once in the JP forum. Yes, as you go up, your drag decreases, but so does lift. If you want to stay up, you have to increase your speed proportionally, which increases induced drag again to the old level. Lift-to-drag ratios for hypersonic vehicles are low, something like 1:5 IIRC, so you're spending a lot of energy just keeping yourself at the same speed and the same altitude. The faster you go up, the less total gravity and air drag losses.

_________________Say, can you feel the thunder in the air? Just like the moment ’fore it hits – then it’s everywhereWhat is this spell we’re under, do you care? The might to rise above it is now within your sphereMachinae Supremacy – Sid Icarus